Yeah... if I do rent big again, chances are I'm just going to throw it at ck.'s solo pool and pray to the BTC gods I get lucky .  I might pick something a bit smaller for here... maybe 20-30TH or so for 3-4 days.

Congrats on the block find.  It's always a great feeling to know that one of your miners did it.  Too funny that your "...Really?" miner was the one that solved the block for BAN

LOL... I've refrained... the wound is still too fresh from the last time I rented

I have 5 Antminer U2 sticks in a USB hub plugged into an rPi running cgminer pointed to ck.'s solo pool.  The whole setup costs virtually nothing to run and it's literally set it and forget it - I haven't touched it since December when we lost power in the house and I had to reboot everything.  I also spend about a day every week where I point 6 S3s to ck.'s pool as well.  Chances are exceptionally slim, but it's worth the gamble - currently losing on a potential 0.02916BTC for the chance at 25BTC.

By the way, you linked Discus Fish and not mmpool in your post.  Here's the proper link for mmpool: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=559011.0

I think we are in agreement that it is the OP's best interest to not bother to mine with the hardware listed

I put into numbers what you're stating.  OP is mining at a loss until such time that BTC goes over £350, which is just going to make him a few pence a day even then... Assuming today's difficulty.

If you're running the p2pool node locally, it has already attached itself to your local bitcoin daemon - assuming of course that you set everything up properly.  When you fire up your miner, you use a BTC address as the user name, and anything you want as a password.

Now, I'm guessing you're using your computer's GPU to mine and bfgminer should be reporting some speed of MH/s.  Chances are EXTREMELY slim that you're going to find any shares that get added onto the chain.

Hard?  Check out my post above showing the numbers.  Even not factoring in initial hardware costs at current BTC->GBP conversions OP is losing money every day by turning those miners on.  Even if BTC went up to £350 OP would barely be covering the electricity to run the miners - and that's given the current difficulty, which is going to change in less than a week's time.

PPLNS pools have ramp up/down times.  PPS pools do not...

LOL... I keep getting the emails about found blocks and think to myself, "at least this should give the pool a nice BTC buffer to manage the payouts during the inevitable bad luck streak."

Guess not.

People call it luck because when you boil it all down a miner is using brute force to attempt to provide a hash that meets the network's target requirements to add the block to the chain.  Depending on how much gear you own, that could be thousands to quadrillions of times a second.  You can take your gear and estimate how long it would be expected to find a block, and via the same formula figure out how much coin you would expect to earn on a daily basis under ideal circumstances.

The point is, though, that it really is luck because there is no guarantee your miner will ever actually produce a hash that satisfies the network's requirements to add the block to the chain.  No matter what the expectations are.  Conversely, you might find that hash in the next second, minute, hour.

People don't solo mine because of the simple fact that the majority do not have enough hardware to give them any reasonable expectation of finding a block on their own.  That's why pools were invented in the first place: to allow the miners a chance to work together to find a block and split the rewards of doing so between them.

When you hear the phrase, "it will average out over time" there really is no defined unit of time.  It isn't a week, a month, or a year.  It is an indication that all things being equal, you will in fact make the expected amount of coin for your hashing power.  The problem with the statement is that there are unpredictable variables: difficulty changes, orphaned blocks, lost hashes, network connectivity problems, etc.  All things aren't equal, and they never will be.  So, we simplify it to make it easier to swallow.

The entire network is subject to this.  Take a look at the recorded swings in network hash rate.  View it over time, a week, 2 months, 9 months, 3 years.  Heck, just take a look at blockchain.info and see the variability in block times and you'll see blocks solved in seconds and blocks that took hours to crack.  It's hard to quantify this, so we simplify it and call it luck, either good or bad.

Here on kano's pool you can witness the same thing.  Take a look at the block stats.  Some blocks are found well before the expected time, some well after.  Will things average out over time?  They may.  Then again, they may not.  We don't know - and we won't know until the time has passed and we can quantify it with the data of what happened in the past.

I would think that sending any BTC you've purchased to an exchange, trading for some other crypto, then going to another exchange and trading it back to BTC would solve your problem.  For example, go to cryptsy, trade your BTC for LTC, then go to bit-x.com (the exchange in my signature) and trade LTC for BTC.

Even using this method, somebody motivated enough could probably trace your transactions through the multiple blockchains... but your own presence on the BTC blockchain would be broken once you transferred the BTC to the other currency at the exchange, since that exchange would now have custody of your BTC.

I guess our definitions of instant and almost instant are different .  On average you're waiting over 16 hours from the time the block is found until the payment can be sent.

You won't receive instant payments - the blocks must mature to 100 confirmations before kano sends payments for them.

Here's an easy breakdown for you...

1) point your miners here
2) pool finds block
3) block gets 100 confirms
4) kano sends you coins

Because it's PPLNS, you have to "ramp up"... which means you're not going to get your full potential until N time has passed, so don't be surprised if on your first payment it's lower than you think it should be.

3.14159265359

Imagine how exciting Pi day was on 3/14/1592 at 6:53:59!

You don't have anything in ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin folder?

Yes, this is how I run my nodes.  Core compiled and built without wallet.  Daemon process running alongside p2pool to feed it work.

9GH/s.  That would expect to earn you 0.00009543BTC a day at current difficulty levels.  With p2pool, you must find a valid share and have it accepted onto the share chain to receive a payout.  It is very similar to solo mining a low-difficulty coin.  Currently, the share difficulty on p2pool is 6060527.57.  With your hash rate, you would expect to find a share in about 33 days.  You might get lucky and find a share sooner, or you may be unlucky and not find one for much longer.

Honestly, you're almost better off hitting faucets.  Maybe try your luck solo mining and hope to hit the lottery.

I'm not sure why you bothered forking the repo unless you intend to write some code and either create your own alt coin from it, or ask the core developers for a pull request on changes you've made to it.

As for how to build from source on Ubuntu... there are a number of documents out there.  For example, here's a link to the one on the current master branch: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/build-unix.md

One thing to note, the master branch is the latest/greatest bleeding edge core software.  The latest release can be found here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases

Welcome to Bitcoin, and good luck!

Even in pence, that's going to be expensive.  The R-Boxes are going to run about 100W each, so 200W there.  The USB sticks are pretty negligible, so I won't even bother counting their draw.  I'm not even going to bother including the hardware costs... you'll see why

.2kWh * 16.82 * 24 = 80.736p a day

Current expected earnings from 224GH/s (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that each r-box will get 110GH/s): 0.002375BTC

Converted to GBP: 0.46 daily.

Last I checked, there were 100p in a GBP.

So, it's going to cost you 80.74p to make 46p a day.  Sounds like a good deal to you?